


spinning the dragline

by starmadeshadows



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Missing Scene, Sibling Bonding, cw: dehumanization, feat. some good ol brain wyrms, mentions of injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25800895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starmadeshadows/pseuds/starmadeshadows
Summary: Hornet, the ghosts of her parents on her shoulders, and an encounter with a literal ghost who is quickly proving itself realer than she was ever prepared to deal with.(which is to say an expanded version of the aftermath of the Grave in Ash sequence)
Relationships: Hornet & The Knight (Hollow Knight)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 80





	spinning the dragline

**Author's Note:**

> fr the record i headcanon that the knight uses it and they pronouns interchangeably but like at this point hornet doesn't know that

The little vessel is surprisingly light, for all that Hornet can feel its insides sloshing around inside it like so much frigid water—and ah, it stings, the hairline cracks where its shell began to buckle under the weight of the old carcass. She studiously does not look down at the leaking bundle of bug under her arm but forward, to the walls, to the ceiling, eyes narrowed for any crevice a needle might find purchase. Spin the thread, throw the needle, swing through open air, _release_ —and here is the key, whispers Herrah over her shoulder, do not think about the ground so far below—spin the thread, throw the needle, let the momentum of freefall carry you forward forward forward—

—and _there_ , to the left, her camp, a nook in the jagged wall of the mountain—her feet find purchase on the ceiling just long enough to push off toward it—something has her off-balance, _right_ , the little bug—so instead of landing neatly on a few legs she tucks and rolls around it. 

(Belatedly: _It will help neither of you to think of it as a bug_ , murmurs a voice at the back of her head, not unkind, but dry as ash.)

She huffs. Unrolls slowly, her needle clattering to the cave floor—the cold has her moving more stiffly than normal—peeling the fabric of her cloak from the vessel's carapace. It's stained, lightly but indelibly, in thin flowering lines, black against the scarlet. It would be beautiful, if it weren't so troubling.

First things first. Spin the thread, throw the—ah, no. Her first attempt goes soaring out into the night, over the lip of the cave and out of sight amid the falling ash. Her eyes dart to the little ghost. It's unconscious still, she thinks, or at least impassive. It's difficult to tell by the eyes alone, round and black and utterly unblinking, not even the barest sheen of chitin beneath. "I'll thank you not to look at me like that," she tells it, anyhow. Spin the thread, draw it out carefully in thumb and foreclaw, loop it just so, "it's been a century or more since I've bound any wounds but my own." She winds the impromptu bandage around its head. That's the most dangerous, she recalls. Leave a vessel's head too badly cracked for too long, and its shade will come seeping out, and that will just serve to complicate both their days. 

The warmth of soul-magic fizzles away all too quick, leaving nothing but a thin weave of spider-silk stained faintly grey—but the leaking has stopped, at least. It doesn't stir when she wraps its cracked shoulder. (Good. Goodness knows she'd want to sleep through such a humiliation. Hadn't they been at one another's throats a mere hour ago?) It twitches only slightly when she gets to its hand, its fingers curling in slightly, and that only because she spends a moment longer than necessary there, prodding at the white brand seared into its palm.

Tenacious thing.

It's sleeping still as she relights the coals of yesterday's fire—she thinks. If not for the eyes, it could pass for a bug, she thinks, as her own head begins to nod. A little one. It could pass for one of her imaginary siblings, all those little creatures with bright eyes and chattery little voices which she used to pretend crowded the corridors of her youth,

( _they are not real, my child, they have no need for names, no more than you would name each and every passing nightmare_ ,)

—her head jerks upright with a start. How long was she out—a minute? An hour? There's something scuffling softly in the dirt, a faint scratching of stone. The vessel is doing—something, very nearby, though it must hear her shift, for its head jerks in her direction. She is frozen, and it is frozen, mid-gesture, a sharp rock gripped tight in its tiny fist, sharp enough to puncture chitin, sharper for being ground against the stone of the floor. But it isn't making a weapon. It... ah.

_why did you sa_

Hornet stares down at the writing in the dust for a good long while, eyes skating across it forwards, backwards. Jagged handwriting, but clear enough. She regards the creature who wrote it. It stares back at her, through her, its head lolling to one side. If not for the dirt staining its little claws, she would doubt it had written anything at all for how still it is.

"...keep going," she says.

 _why did you save me?_ it finishes, and then sits primly, staring up. Still as the stone it wields, except for the rise and fall of its breathing. She had never really understood why vessels felt a need to breathe, but they did it anyhow. Maybe there was some kind of vestigial mechanism for it left in there, drowned in void-sludge.

(Exhaustedly, He had said, and with a vaguely conspiratorial air: after _all, in the end, even We are not perfect_. 

Then: _you may go, my child._

When she did not: _...Please._ )

Hornet swallows, and takes a deep breath, and when she speaks it comes out sharp and direct and true (spin the words, throw the needle). "That is simple. You are a child of the Pale King and bear his brand. Now you are King, and the King is Hallownest, and I am its sworn princess-protector."

It... Nods, at that, or it lifts its chin, and then drops its head, like a marionette with a cut string.

Hornet begins the process of smoothing her cloak—ah, no, that isn't a fold, that's a tear. Doubtless from a very small nail. She pulls out a needle, a little one, made of bone rather than steel, and begins to weave red thread across the divide, darning where the fabric is too torn to seam.

A flurry of movement in the corner of her eye catches her short. The little bug flaps its cloak sharply with its arms, though its face remains perfectly still of course, eyes boring deep into her head. Then it hops up—pauses just long enough to burn off a little soul, to heal itself of what her thread could not—and continues flapping, with an—indignant?—stamp of its foot.

It's enough to startle a giggle out of her. A sharp one, all edges—"Little ghost," she says, and "little Ghost—what are you _doing_?" It's only been active like this in combat—then again, she hasn't met it terribly much outside of combat—is it more flawed than she believed? Is it fair to call this a flaw?

It falls to the floor, quick enough to make her scramble to her feet—but no, it's just writing again. 

_because SISTER_

The word cuts as sharply as if they'd taken the rock which carved it to her chest. It—Absolutely not. That couldn't have been further from her mind when she'd dug out its sorry shell. But they're staring at her, shaking slightly, tapping their feet excitedly against the floor, as though their sloshing brains have put together one and one and come up eleven.

"We share a father, yes," she says, slowly, "but I have no siblings, only—"

They launch themself at her before she can get out any kind of reaction but a shriek, and they wrap their little arms around her thorax, with a jittering series of swats to the shoulder as if to say _don't be absurd!_

—it isn't unlike the weight of something imaginary, Hornet thinks. So light, and so cold, but it manages to press on her chest like nightmares do, in the twilit hours between sleep and waking. She is every inch as stiff and motionless, too, even after it lets her go.

Her head is spinning. She shakes it. For once, the ashen voice of her father's memory is silent.

Hornet lurches forward. Reaches out, clawing at the air behind its back. Why is this so much harder than tucking an unconscious little nothing under her arm was? Her hand is the wrong shape for this. Nevertheless she drags the little ghost in, pressing it hard to her thorax until it begins to squirm, and then easing up until it begins to relax.

Something very, very cold spots against the front of her cloak. She peers down. Black ink is smeared across the front of its mask. Her cloak as well. If it wasn't going to stain before, it will now. 

She... Supposes she has a spare.

**Author's Note:**

> ...a dragline being either a lifeline or the first thread in the foundation of a spider's web.


End file.
